Ain’t life grand? December 14, 2009
Posted by Sharny in : Essay,Life,School,Thoughts,Work , add a commentSo this is the updatery and depressive post that will explain why I’m posting here again and why I have relaunched durka. It’s not exactly going to be much fun but I kinda want to write some things not addressed to myself and explain the sudden reappearence of posting.
As planned, this year I started higher education at Nottingham University on the 21st of September, after moving in the day before. Things didn’t exactly have the easiest start, you hear tales of university being so much better than school before hand and people really finding themself and such. I didn’t get so lucky. All of it was a massive struggle and it was all a very depressing and downtreading time. As a few weeks went by and routine began to set in things did get better, as they surely do.
Then, something rather unexpected happened. Essentially, in the space of a day I realised that Chemistry was not the course for me. It was a real epiphany moment, and not a moment I wanted to have. There were other doubts around it, including ones about whether being at University was even the right thing for me to be doing. Through talking and thinking and thinking and talking some more I got some plan of what to do.
Windows Implosion December 8, 2009
Posted by Sharny in : Internets,Scraps,Technology , add a commentI’ve just about managed to mop my computer up from a nice little bit of random operating system failure. The computer crashes and then windows doesn’t load any further than the loading screen with no real clue as to what went wrong or where. So after a while spent using a Knoppix CD to back up all my documents (my computer has 2 hard drives, makes backing up that bit easier or looking at it alternatively that bit harder as I still felt inclined to do an external back up too) I reinstalled windows.
I was actually able to install without formatting but my files have all become completely inaccessible in windows (but not Knoppix, weirdly). So those backups were worth it. I figure this would be a good time to convert to windows 7, so I grabbed my student edition. Not sure if I wanted 64 or 32 bit version I consulated wikipedia (perhaps not the wisest choice) and found my processor (Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600) was 64 bit only so I got the 64 bit version. Now that I have XP back up and running all the system tests seem to indicate that it’s 32.
So I’m generally quite confused and fear that I may have wasted £40 on a new version that might not work. I have no idea whether I should risk it or not, although I imagine if it isn’t going to work it will tell me before formatting and getting rid of XP (which did take quite a while to set up again). Windows: Can’t live with it, can’t live without it. Well, actually I would if linux had a perfect equivilant to itunes but I don’t think that’s likely to happen any time soon.
I really do hate being without 5.1 speaker tunage to the max…
Ok computer, it’s on June 2, 2008
Posted by Sharny in : Gaming,Instances,Rants,Technology,World of Warcraft , add a commentAfter buying a new graphics card and then finding out that I don’t have the right slot for it. Simply put I made a bad assumption that my computer was built at all in a way that would allow it to be upgraded when in fact it seems more like they cut as many corners as they could. I was hoping to get a quick and cheap upgrade to my computer to keep it going till at least this time next year but it wasn’t to be. As I essentially spent £50 on something useless I decided that now would be a good time to do what I’ve been saying for a while that I would – build my own computer.
Doing some eBay based price research revealed that the cost of buying the parts to assemble myself came up to about the same amount as buying a computer of the spec I want but without the graphics card (or actually just with a not very good graphics card as all the ones I’ve seen have ones included), perhaps a little bit more. I figure that paying a bit more to get exactly what I want as well as the experience of putting it all together is worth it.
Todays raiding experience has highlighted the need for this new computer.
As I had not been experiencing the persistent crashes – the computer just restarts for no good reason, error report contains the most useless crap reason it pulled out of its “We dunno what happened so here is something random we noticed” bag – recently I kinda thought maybe they had fixed themselves, as these things sometimes do. Alas today I was shown this clearly wasn’t the case. Before the raid started I got the first restart, then again after releasing spirit after the first wipe and then a further time after just having got back into Serpentshrine Cavern (my first time in there, kinda cool, didn’t down any bosses but that’s the way it is sometimes) again after a wipe. This combined with the other graphics card bugs puts a level of urgency on a new computer.
Not to mention, <20fps looks fucking awful.
Nice Surprises April 27, 2008
Posted by Sharny in : Fun,Gaming,Instances,Life,World of Warcraft , add a commentI forgot to actually make the post about it but Sapphiron did actually manage to down the Lynx boss in ZA on Saturday. More than that, we did it in two proper attempts, first attempt was good and we got him to about 35%, then we had a messed up and the tank died straight away because us healers were moving and on the next try we got him. As such I’m very proud of us, looking at Be Imba for the healers that were there only one of the three are even in a position to perform well in ZA according to that and we’re 4/6 in there.
I probably should start to take a meter to see if I’m actually healing as expected although it probably won’t tell me much, the other paladin healer that the guild has is substantially better geared than me (probably has more experience aswell).
In other WoW news, my latencies at home are still unplayable and I seem to be able to do nothing about it. Given that it happens regardless of whether my connection is going via my router or not I don’t think it can be a port forwarding issue. I also don’t think it can be a firewall issue because if it were the game would simply have no connection, I’ve never known my firewall to just heavily block something. This kinda leaves me suspecting my ISP but my friend has the same ISP as me and although I’ve had a few strange disconnects on his computer my latencies are fine.
I’ve also canceled my subscription due to my upcoming exams, although I may have carried on playing if I could play at home as it’s nice to have the game to relax with, without it I can’t really reward myself for having done some good revision as I don’t really want to play any other games. It might be for the best though, given that these are exams are so important.
Will I ever encounter a computer that just works? March 17, 2008
Posted by Sharny in : Life,Rants,Technology , add a commentComputers. Wonderful things. The main issue however, is that they never seem to actually work. I have never encountered a single computer that didn’t have something wrong with it, some weird behavior, something it did that made no sense or something that just didn’t work. A few times I’ve been able to quite happily put this down to the age of the machine or the fact that it’s components just weren’t that good. But that has stopped working.
I got my current computer for the Christmas before last, it was a very exciting moment for me, the first time I had ever gotten a computer all for myself and one that was good enough to play the games I wanted to play and do the things I wanted to do. Things didn’t exactly start off well when the video card that came with it was faulty, oh well, back to the shop with that. They replaced it free of charge and I also bought and had them install another 512MB stick of RAM as it only had the one at the time. Things were lovely for quite some time after that, everything seemed to be working fine. I started playing World of Warcraft and it could handle that no problem.
Then things start going wrong. I have honestly no idea what caused it but WoW just started crashing the computer all the time, just causing it to instantly restart. It would only happen when playing WoW (save for I think one time) and almost always when loading a new zone. Windows had about as much idea of what was going on as I did, giving a range of complete crap as to what has caused it, none of which made much sense and sounded very vague and unhelpful. I cut down a bit on my at home WoW playing as it just got too irritating having it just crash all the time. Originally I thought over heating could be to blame (as according to a temperature monitor I installed things were running pretty hot in there) and thought maybe cleaning inside could help but it didn’t, this weren’t actually very dusty in there at all in fact. I came up with a sort of semi-fix for when it restarted the computer, this was essentially to unplug it before it started up and then plug back in and start up properly. Once started I would close all the situational processes I never use and open very little else on the computer. This seemed to work.
More recently an even stranger thing started happening. Something in my computer started rattling. The first time I turned my computer on to hear this I freaked out, since rattling inside the case is generally not a good sign. I did discover, however, that this noise didn’t seem to have any effect on the actual operation of the computer, which led me to turn the computer off and open it up to see if I could find the cause. Once I got in there everything just looked completely normal but upon turning the computer on again the rattling started once more, seemingly coming from the power supply. Over the next few days I worked out that it probably rattles according to the heat, when the computer is cold (eg when turned on after being off during the night) it is really loud and as the computer warms up it gets quieter until it becomes silent. A quick Google search reveals other people with similar problems generally getting told to replace their fans, at the moment I’m not sure what I’m going to do, if it were rattling all the time it would make sense to me but the heat dependency thing is just really weird…
Just to make things worse my computer is being crashed by WoW even more now, even with all excess process closed, iTunes not running (or any program for that matter) it crashed 3 times whilst zoning so far today. It basically makes the game unplayable and given that my friends are away home is the only place I can get my WoW hit during this first week of the easter holidays. At the moment it is kinda working but I can’t really guarantee anything at the moment which is pretty annoying.
To return to my title a bit, a few other examples of computer failings include my friend’s new Dell which is only a few months old but is already suffering from a failing hard drive and intermittent blue screens, their older one which has a good few error messages upon start up (but otherwise works alright-ish) and their oldest which, following a recent format and clean inside the case, cannot be relied upon to do anything more than browse the internet.
In essence, this point is pretty pointless as I don’t imagine that computers will ever stop failing on me or anyone else. Ever. Ultimately, I’m just going to have to put up with not having a computer for a few days whilst presumably some parts get replaced and hopefully sort out my problems without a format and really get used to it (although it’s not really like I’m not used to it already, given the number of formats our previous computer had).
It would just be nice if, for once, something worked…
